December 08, 2013

I had been driving up to visit her every couple of weeks, in the skilled nursing facility in Portland that her daughters carefully researched out for her. She had been getting ever more frail, but had been holding up pretty well and staying her chipper strong-willed self, but then the inevitable happened as the stricken organs began at last to fail.

When I last saw her, a week ago, she was slipping in and out of consciousness -- but gently, more like a cycle of dozing off mid-sentence, fluttering the eyelids awake, then dozing off again. I had been told she had been having trouble recognizing people, but when I greeted her, she did know who I was. I sat with her for an hour or so, fed her some ice cream, held her hand, and kissed her. And then it was time to go, and I knew as I left that it was likely the last time I'd see her alive -- and I knew that was out of my hands, and that I had said what felt like a meaningful goodbye.

I was very calm when one of her daughters called to give me the news -- it felt like I had done all my grieving after my first visit with her in the care facility, right after we all got the news that her condition had gone end-stage. And I did grieve hard ... and then life goes on, and it's hard to stay in that hypervigilant mind-state one enters when confronting mortality up close and personal, so one slides back into detachment.

But I'm reconnecting with the feelings now, having just spent some time poking around in YouTube looking up songs my friend loved. She was a huge John Denver fan -- already considered a corny-oldie musical preference by the time she and I met in the 1990s -- but there's no denying his songs are lovely and graceful, and they definitely did the job of all good music by putting the lump in my throat and the sting in my eyes.

So this is for you, Ann -- safe as you are now in the arms of the Goddess. Your memory will always be a blessing for me.

P.S. I think she would have loved that she slipped away in the teeth of a snowstorm -- a most unusual meteorological event in the Willamette Valley, and definitely rife with all sorts of Jungian/mythical symbolism.

November 05, 2013

At the risk of sounding grandiose for stating such a big issue so baldly, I confess I am very pessimistic regarding the future of the human race. It seems to me that as a species we are bound and determined to continue our lemming-like headlong run of unsustainable economic and population growth, till we plunge over the cliff-edge of environmental collapse.

This is hardly a new concern, either for me personally or out in the world of ideas; it was memorably addressed by The Limits To Growth, just to name one prominent work on the subject. But despite this and many other academic and political Cassandras-predictions about the disaster we are courting, homo sapiens continues to chew up resources and spew waste products with no regard for the consequences.

Indeed, according to a recently-published New Statesman article, we may well have blown past the tipping point beyond which even reforms of our current systems will not be enough to stave off full-blown collapse. Of course, as the article points out, part of why things have gotten to this point are the forces impeding any but the most perfunctory reforms, mainly corporations who pay governments and lobbies to prevent any inconvenient limits on their resource-devouring bottom lines.

Even the latest world economic recession, precipitated when the US housing bubble proved by its collapse that it was nothing more than an overblown Ponzi scheme, was not enough to scare these corporations. Like addicts, their leadership is in full-blown denial that their compulsive pursuit of growth by any means possible is just another huge Ponzi scheme, doomed to collapse with proportionally larger and more disastrous consequences.

Mind you, I have no better idea how to fix this problem than anyone else. My vote and my opinion seem to count so little against the corporations and their addiction to ever-expanding production. I do still believe that raising my voice about these issues is important. But the powers-that-be have also proven themselves adept at drowning out criticism with dollars and disinformation, so raising one's voice is only a necessary-but-insufficient first step.

I dream of a movement to unite all the counter-cultural forces great and small, old and new, to collectively throw the brakes on our economy's unlimited growth before we reach the cliff. It seems like such an impossible dream -- not only is getting any kind of unified front among progressives like herding about a gazillion cats, but it may already be too late. But anything is better than the alternative: just letting the whole thing keep charging along at full speed until our species slams into the Malthusian catastrophe at the bottom of that cliff.

September 04, 2013

I am currently going through another one of those close encounters with mortality that are the peculiar fate of our conscious and social species. This time it is occasioned by a dear old friend whose long-term incurable health issue has finally started sliding into the final few months before death.

As with those previous close encounters, this one has torn away that everyday complacency/denial about death, and thrust the fragility of life, including my own, right up in my face. It is understatement to note that this is a humbling and scary place to be.

Also as with those previous encounters, awareness of death is once again making it startlingly clear what in life is important and what is chaff. The classic truism applies: life is too short to waste on random crap. Or on feeling like crap. Or on doing stuff that makes one feel like crap. Shifting of priorities, assessments of personal bucket lists, and contemplation of legacies has begun. Pledges to enjoy life to the fullest and be present in the moment have been renewed.

I am going to keep the details of my friend's journey pretty private - it is hers, after all, and not mine. But I figure my reactions to and reflections on her journey are fair game for commentary. As an online geek, I have long used blogging as one of my preferred modes of therapy -- and so periodic blogging will be my way of dealing with the realities of illness, death and dying, up close and bedside personal. (And in taking care of my own baggage, here and with my personal support network, I will be better able to be present for my friend.)

August 23, 2013

I was conversing with some foodie folks online the other day, and the topic of what to do with a surplus of good baking apples came up, and I found myself thinking of my grandmother's bread pudding.

Now mind you, my my paternal grandmother was one of those Jewish bubbes who defied stereotypes by being at best a mediocre cook. It was not for her lack of trying. In fact, according to family legend, she and my grandfather at one point even ran a luncheonette; I figured the quality of Grandma's cooking was part of why they were on to the bungalow colony business by the time I came into the world. The particular badness of her cooking, again according to family legend, resulted from her dedication to some "healthy cooking" punditry of her era, which insisted that all seasonings were bad for you, including salt, and that all food needed to be cooked thoroughly to kill any contaminants. So: imagine rubbery boiled chicken, roast beef cooked till gray, hamburgers ground from the same cut of kosher beef as the roast then also cooked till gray, salads of iceberg lettuce with a few gratings of carrot and a few limp cucumber slices -- all innocent of any seasoning or condiment. It was kind of grim.

But Grandma was such an endearing sort, plus I was such a non-picky eater as a kid, that I happily chowed down on her food even while wondering why her hamburgers looked and tasted so different from my Mom's.

Grandma's way with bread pudding was especially endearing. There were apple trees by her house that produced very tart, very hard little apples -- at a guess, some kind of McIntosh that had gone semi-feral. Periodically during apple season Grandma would go and collect every windfall apple from the ground, then painstakingly peel and cut the bad parts from the whole lot. If I were visiting, I'd sometimes help -- some of these apples, by the time we cut away all the bad parts, produced maybe a tablespoon's worth of good apple flesh. Meanwhile, Grandma would haul out the big bag of stale bread she had been collecting up over several weeks, break it all into pieces, and then pile the apple chunks and bread into a big casserole dish. And that was pretty much it. No cinnamon, no sugar, no butter (oh yeah, fats were unhealthy too according to that primordial health pundit). Into the oven it would go, with aluminum foil on top, to bake until it burned slightly on the bottom. I don't know if the burnt bits were an intentional goal, but it always was the result.

And the weird thing was that, maybe it was childhood tastebuds or love of Grandma, but that bread pudding didn't taste half bad. I also think that the oven's heat did succeed in releasing enough moisture from the apples to moisten the bread, get the whole thing to cohere, and even caramelize the apples (at least the ones that didn't char on the bottom). In any case, I did like her bread pudding and would eat it with gusto.

Years later, thinking about my grandmother (her memory for a blessing) and her escape from the shtetls of pre-World War I Russia in the teeth of pogroms, war, and political upheaval, I saw her apple gleaning and bread hoarding in a whole new light. Times were hard before and after she emigrated to the Goldene Medina, and I reckon it was simple pragmatism to let no scrap of food go to waste, nor to spare any scarce cash on expensive seasonings. The bread of survival can be pretty plain fare, but a grandmotherly figure stooping under a tree to gather windfall apples can transform even the lowliest food into a nourishing memory.

May 05, 2012

Recently, by economic necessity as well as changing food and health preferences, I have really been cutting down on my meat consumption. So as soon as I got settled in my new digs, I hauled out the pressure cooker and started making with the bean cookery again.

Up until recently I have had mixed feelings about beans in general and my beans in particular. I would make batches of nice healthy beans with all sorts of veggie aromatics and seasonings, and they would taste really great to me. But I would always wind up throwing out the last third uneaten, because I got too bored with them to finish them ... or to even want to save them in the freezer. Finally though, I started getting a lot more inventive about adding small amounts of flavorful meat to the beans, and I think I have finally put an end to boring myself with my beans.

Of course I had known about the classic US Southeastern soul food practice of cooking beans with a ham hock, which I have done and do love ... but alas, even blanched, a ham hock makes beans too salty for my damn finicky ankles. Plus in recent years ham hocks, like so many other traditional poor people's foods, have crept up in price until now they're pretty ridiculous. Ditto the most popular choice for alternative meaty addition to beans, smoked turkey parts. But then I started expanding my imagination regarding meat-aromatics to add to beans, and things started getting fun.

Like this week's success: garbanzo beans first cooked to tenderness via pressure cooker, then simmered with Mexican chorizo, dried shiitake mushrooms, and a whole bulb's worth of garlic cloves. The chorizo, which is skinless, pretty much dissolved into the broth and permeated everything, as did the garlic. I am going to have no trouble at all whipping through this batch to the last drop. In fact I still don't have a photo of this dish to post because every time I serve myself a bowlful, I discover I have eaten half of it before I remember "oh wait, I was going to photograph this stuff ... "

I've had fun pairing beans with other sausages too -- though again, sausages have gotten a bit pricey unless you can find them on sale. The Mexican sausages have the advantages of being super-cheap, and super-spicy, so a little goes a long way. And using just a little meat is not only good sense economically and health-wise, but even cookery-wise as well, I am discovering. It has to be just enough meat so that its flavor accents the beans, but not so much that it completely blots them out. I'm finally learning how to recognize where that "just enough" is. And the results are working for me.

April 22, 2012

This handy little web form lets you choose your ingredients from lists, then creates a customized recipe containing your ingredients. Its creator cautions that she has not tested every possible combination for tastiness, but it's hard to guess wrong with the choices she has included. Cute simple app! Someone should whip one up for non-vegan meatloaves too.

April 12, 2012

Stash makes amazing food, with the emphasis on locally-sourced ingredients, and blogs about his creations. I met him online a few years back on a food forum; I wandered off to other online venues but in the meantime Stash has been very busy with his blog. Check it out!

March 29, 2012

I've been living in my new nest in Eugene, Oregon for a month now, but things have only recently settled down enough for me to check in about them.

First, the big drive from San Diego to here: very beautiful, though very loooooong. I wish I could have afforded the time and funds to spread the trip over more than four days, so that I could have spent more time stopping to smell the roses, and had less grueling sessions on the road. I did get interestingly random glimpses of various towns whenever I stopped to refuel vehicle or driver, such as the funky convenience store in Bandon that sold fishing and gold-panning gear as well as cappucino with your biscuits and gravy. But mostly I was rolling, trying to get to that evening's stop before nightfall ... and sometimes failing, damn those still-shortish February days. (You can see a few photos from my trip here.)

Settling into Eugene: it took a little while for me to adjust to the environment, which was colder and wetter than I recalled -- or perhaps Eugene's spring-transitional weather is even wackier than Seattle's; or maybe it's just that my blood has been overly thinned from a decade in balmy Southern California. Evidently my immune system is not used to the local Eugene bugs either, because the very first thing I did after arriving in town was to catch a nasty cold. And there have been other weirdnesses too -- like the morning after the Spring Equinox, when we woke to an extremely unusual six inches of snow on the ground; or the morning after that, when the melting snow overwhelmed our already rain-sodden yard, resulting in a little flood in the basement room where I am currenty residing. But the flood waters receded and my little nest dried out, so now I am back in it.

And all that precipitation does mean that the Eugene area is lushly green. It's a small town, so it only takes a few minutes' driving in any direction to be in either verdant farmland or mossy woods. I'm looking forward to seeing those fields and forests get more actively springlike. Meanwhile I am being charmed by Eugene's small-town-meets-hippie-mindset funkiness. Since I am currently living in the Whiteaker, the town's acknowledged hippie neighborhood, the funk is front and center in my street and house and everything. But there are splashes of funkitude even in the most non-funky locations, such as the bright-yellow-painted Thai food stand I found nestled among auto dealerships and strip malls the other day.

Still have a lot of exploring to do, but initial phase of relocation can be definitely hailed as a success. Now to just hang out in this new berg and see what kind of trouble I can get myself into.

February 19, 2012

I have gotten rid of a few large pieces of furniture through Freecycle, which is an organization with a wonderful concept: people giving and/or getting stuff that one person no longer has use for but somebody else does, rather than see that stuff wind up in a landfill. Like any organization, though, I have discovered a few people don't quite get the concept: why someone would email me that they are desperately in need of an item, then turn up, take one look at the item, make some excuse to step outside, and then vanish, leaving only a text message saying "sorry for wasting your time," I have no idea. But yes, anonymous person, you not only wasted my time, but the time of all the other people who also wanted that item but who I waitlisted because you said you were desperate. Plus that was incredibly rude just running off like that, instead of having the guts to tell me to my face that you changed your mind. Fortunately one of the waitlisted people did eventually come take that item and was grateful for it.

Meanwhile, my roommate has taken the approach of getting rid of her unwanted large items via Craigslist, which has its own weirdnesses. She tells me she has discovered there's some kind of magic price point, above which your item is ignored, but once you do hit it you get deluged with emails. It's raw Adam Smith "invisible hand" supply/demand economics at its best. Or whatever. She too ran into a certain casualness among potential customers, such as one fellow who said he'd be over at 1 pm but didn't bother to show, let alone text he was running late, until 4 pm. At least he did buy my friend's sofa. But why some people are so lackadaisical about wasting other people's time, I will never understand.

I am no Felix Unger in the housekeeping department, but I think I am far from alone in waiting to clean under large hard-to-move pieces of furniture until said pieces absolutely need to be moved, as in this situation. This can lead to moments of discovery--some pleasant, as in "Oh my god, so that's where that earring got to!" ... and some not so much, as in "Oh my god, so that's where the leakage from that bottle of soy sauce got to!"

Did you know that soy sauce, allowed to dry for several months, forms an admirably tough shellac on linoleum flooring? Well, now you know. As do I. Maybe another five or six applications of household cleaner will peel off the remaining layers. Maybe we can convince the landlord that soy-laquer flooring is the Next Big Thing. (I kid, I kid--the soy sauce is dissolving nicely, though with a few more applications of cleaner than I would have expected).

I think I have said this before, but I will say it again: this move has convinced me that I shall never again own any household goods that I cannot personally move by myself unaided. Radical self-reliance for the modern age: from now on, any item I own will either fold up, roll up, deflate, or be digitized.

Have I mentioned how much I love packing to move? As in, for "love" read "love to hate." Oh well--at least I have the road trip to look forward to. Which I love as in "love to love."